The Professor. Charlotte Stein

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ codswallop about Remains of the Day. Or did you come up with that load of old bollocks about duty being more important than passion in your sleep?’

      I think my mouth drops open. The ‘calibre’ comment was bad enough.

      But to have the boldfaced nerve to claim that.

      ‘But you said that was what it meant. You said duty was a passion of its own, and underlined it seventeen times on the board in permanent marker. Professor Tate complained!’

      ‘Professor Tate is an insufferable ignoramus.’

      ‘That doesn’t change the fact that you just criticised me and berated me for something you yourself actually believe.’

      ‘Ah, but that is the exact problem, Miss Hayridge. Just because I believe something does not mean that you are obliged to do the same. It seems to me that you spend a great deal of your time telling people exactly what you think they might want to hear, and doing things exactly as you think might best please them, instead of daring to be as brilliant as you quite possibly are.’

      I go to say something when he’s done with this little speech. Something as hot-headed and outraged as my comments a moment ago. No, that isn’t the case at all, you don’t know anything about me, I think, but by the time the words get to the tip of my tongue I can’t let them emerge.

      Shock wipes them out, and leaves only the weakest words behind.

      ‘I don’t believe passion is more important than duty.’

      ‘I see. So you think he was right to throw his single, tiny, glimmering chance of happiness away to be a butler for a Nazi.’

      ‘That’s a really uncharitable reading of the book, Professor. He had no idea he was the butler of a Nazi. He thought they were all wise and doing the right thing and besides – maybe he wouldn’t have been happy. Did you think about that? He might have hated being married to her. He might have come to despise her, once away from everything he knew.’

      ‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right. Never loving or being loved sounds like a marvellous way to live your life,’ he says, and now that amusement is back. Thicker though, this time. Harsher, somehow, and with a slight twist to his lips once he’s done speaking.

      Not quite a bitter sneer, I think.

      But almost.

      ‘He loved his work.’

      ‘Did his work love him? Did it keep him warm at night, do you think? Perhaps in those long hours he spent reading about other people enjoying the delight of a romance, he comforted himself with the thought that tomorrow he might polish the silver.’

      ‘This is the complete opposite of what you said in your lectures.’

      ‘But not the complete opposite of what you’ve expressed in this story, Miss Hayridge. This story is all but bursting at the seams with passion. It’s clear in both its themes, and in the way you chose to address them – not in the milky, meek tones of someone who wants to coast by unnoticed in a class they most probably find dull, but in a raging beast of a voice that refuses to be quiet, no matter what the consequences might be.’

      I don’t know when he started leaning towards me. I only know that he is much closer by the time he gets to those last heart-pounding words. He must be, because I can see so many new details of that incredible face. Like the tiny tick of a scar right through the bow of his upper lip, so fine you could never see it from any distance away. And his eyelashes, far darker than the hair on his head and too long for someone so masculine. They look the way most people’s do when rain hits them, spiky and suddenly thick.

      Beautiful, I think.

      Then want to look away, before that one word shows on my face somehow.

      It probably already has, when I think about it. My attraction to him is so visceral, he could grasp it with both hands and squeeze.

      Downplaying it is of the utmost importance.

      ‘It’s just a silly smutty story.’

      ‘Do you really believe so?’

      ‘It has the word “cock” on page two.’

      ‘And that qualifies it as silly, does it?’

      ‘It qualifies it as smutty, at the very least.’

      ‘I could find you a dozen award-winning books right now that have that word in them. Though I suppose that is the issue, is it not? When men write about sex in boring books about recapturing their lost youth, they are invariably rewarded with praise. When women do it they are laughed at and ghettoised until a student who finally produces a piece of work worthy of my attention only gives it to me by accident.’

      He says ‘accident’ the way most people say ‘appalling nightmare’. I can practically feel how offended he is that I really did just mess up – as though he can see how close I came to never being here and never doing this and shudders at the thought. It’s strangely the best thing anyone has ever said to me.

      But also the most terrifying.

      Probably because he then cracks his knuckles and rolls his shoulders, like someone about to fight me. And his brisk tone, when he speaks again, absolutely reflects that.

      ‘Now, to the business at hand.’

      ‘There is more business?’

      ‘Of course, Miss Hayridge. Surely you do not believe I brought you here to commend you for finally giving me work I might be satisfied with, but would then let you go on your merry way without another word? Dear me, no, that will never do. No no no, we have a great deal of work to do, Miss Hayridge – work we shall continue every day at five from now until I deem it done.’

      He glances up at me when I don’t reply. Eyes suddenly lit in a way they’ve never been before, one brow just ever so slightly raised.

      ‘Unless you have something better to do?’ he asks, and for just a second I think about lying. Out of habit more than anything – when people say things like that to me I usually do. I have to, if I don’t want to seem small and pathetic. Everyone else has such exciting lives, filled with endless mixers and lock-ins and barbecues. The students who live across from my flat above a shop once played miniature golf on their roof terrace. A guy was arrested the other day for stealing a penguin from the local zoo.

      The most I ever did was come here and stay.

      But the thing is, with Professor Halstrom…

      Why would I not say?

      ‘Not even one tiny thing.’

       Chapter Two

      He tells me to bring him something new the next time I come. ‘If you have the time,’ he says, but I think he already knows I do. He knew everything else, after all. He knew things I had no idea about myself. I thought I was absolutely fine going on as I did before. Pretending to smile when СКАЧАТЬ